Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

CALIFORNIA ATTY-GENERAL MORE WORRIED ABOUT PERMITS THAN BABY ORGAN TRAFFICKING

Most people who follow the news chatter know by now that a Planned Parenthood executive was caught on video talking about how the price of a specific baby organ depends on the disparate difficulty it causes the abortionist during the “extraction”, a euphemism for prenatal infanticide. The word “crunch” came up several times.

So what does the Attorney General of California promise to do? Root out this evil incentive for baby parts trafficking? No, she’s going to investigate whether there is any permit or license that the messenger forgot to get in this filming, and if the messenger violated any of the minuscule regulations on such matters.

Of course with the massive Hollywood press industry in the middle and paparazzi protections in place, maybe they’ll have some difficulty.

After all, nobody protested, or requested such an investigation, of Michael Moore, who pulled the same kind of stunt on Clint Eastwood for his anti-gun film.

Some in Congress are indignantly talking about investigating. These are politicians mostly of the party that has had several chances to shut down the massive federal funding this infanticide industry gets, and in the several states, and have not done so. Maybe somebody has the inside scoop on these reluctant pro-life politicians.

And `let’s give a nod to those Democrat Party Congressmen who could have blocked the infanticide-friendly Obamacare law, but were pushed, cajoled and even lobbied personally by President Barack Obama himself to obey. Bart Stupak was the “last hope”, he sacrificed his political career to what he had to know was a lying promise from the president’s mouth, and dragged the few fellow pro-life Democrats to defeat in the next election.

Whatever did Obama *really* say to Stupak in that secret meeting? What incentives, arguments, threats?

How can anybody say that there is government “by the people” if the elected politicians can conspire with union bosses to sign contracts that steal other people’s money to fund public employee pensions?

Every legislature that burdens future legislatures and future generations with a growing debt and theft by inflation is committing a robbery that no non-governmental criminal organization can match in its brazen immorality, its arrogance, committed under a cover story of playing fair and favoring the poor.
But then again, the voters go ho-hum and too many of them think they’re voting for “fairness”, when demagogues promise to “help the poor” and soak the rich. They ARE the rich people!

Ryan makes a good point here. People think it’s really bad when a mayor gives the garbage utility contract to his own company. That’s obviously a conflict of interest. Nepotism is a dirty word.

And yet seniors have a vote on who can use other people’s extorted moneys to give to them. Welfare recipients vote on who takes other people’s money to give to them. The long list does not just include not only food stamp recipients, Medicaid, healthcare subsidies for the poor, Section Eight housing. There are nationally protected industries and unions who benefit materially from government policies. Students get federal aid and think it’s a great program.

We have a zillion laws against conflicts of interest in working for government and in working for companies. In many cases it is a crime for a company employee to receive gifts in exchange for favoring one vendor over another.

The same idea applied to political elections would make elections much more fair.

If you get any benefits at all from government, you give up your “right to vote” on who pays you those benefits, whether it’s a job, or direct subsidies, or any program moneys at all. Subsidies would include of course all corporate subsidies and the effect would apply to all employees of any said company. That means all of them. It means all organizations that work on electing anybody.

Corporations would have less political clout that way. Welfare recipients too, but nobody wants to get a label of Scrooge. Private companies even now budget lots of money for “charities”.

A person seeking employment would consider this. No more political promises to “bring home the bacon”. No more representatives pushing to allocate bases to their home towns and messing with the voter base that got them their job, even though they cannot vote.

Even some of these staged shows the industry calls “reality shows” do not allow contestants to vote for themselves.

(The industry likes to call them “reality” shows, but who in the real world normally goes naked in a bug-infested jungle full of briers, bristles and thorns to see if they can last 21 days? They are game shows, innovative as they may be)

This episode of changing rules in Honduras just shows the general peril of ANY government. Democracy is NOT any “better” than any other form of government. Power corrupts. Taxation is extortion by definition, no matter how many of the majority vote for it. Follow the law or go to jail. By the way, though, I read various articles on the proceedings, and they are not the end of the democracy as depicted, so much as a lot of noise and riot by a party founded by people who in power did much worse, of course.

The United States’ long history is the best attempt maybe along those lines, and look where it is now. The “strong media” of the 19th century is now a sycophantic mouthpiece for more control over every piece of your life by government. The best example of this is their treatment of the champion of individual freedom in the United States in his presidential campaign, Ron Paul.

But college kids loved him. He was different, and showed character by shutting down lobbyists, like Larry Abrammoff said in a Q&A on CSpan once, he was one that you could not get anything from him with offers of money. Otherwise, he said they’re more or less all for sale.

Centralization of power in the United States began with the Constitution, had a false start with Alexander Hamilton’s central bank baby, which Andrew Jackson killed off, got a second wind with Abraham Lincoln, and then accelerated after the Federal Reserve Bank was created and populated with the bankers they were supposedly going to regulate for the people’s interest, and it was created after a campaign that pretended it was to stop their abuses. The Income Tax was another abuse enacted the same year. It’s an abuse because I don’t have the right to tell you how much you get to keep of the fruits of your labor and how much you have to pay me for “protection”. Even if you vote for me. Theft is theft. Or call it extortion if you must, because it depends also on how “stable” such thieves are in office.

At least by a vote they have to got through pretense.

Allende was voted a plurality in Chile, and when he began ruling as an economic and political tyrant, the Congress had no constitutional remedy, so they passed a resolution DEMANDING that the military stop him. Allende did not yield to diplomatic pressure, either, and a lot of that saw the (again) sycophantic controlled “strong” media cheering Allende for cutting down Anaconda copper.

The media (outside Honduras) did not report the abused Allende perpetrated any more than they did Zelaya’s. But in 2009 we already had the Internet. So the only mainstream reporting during both abusive regimes was condemnatory of the moves against leftist-fascism.

Think not; more centralized control is their game plan. At least that’s what they do. Some as zombies, true, but nonetheless.

That’s why hope for Honduras, in my opinion, has two grounds for optimism.

ONE, the fact that one of the poorest country in Latin America, and that was already saturated by violent gangs and the same demagaguery as Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and even Argentina and Brazil, nonetheless pushed back against the tyranny.

TWO, they worked quickly to find a way to bring Honduras out of the vicious poverty swamp. They scoured the world and brought people from Chile to share how they became the first Latin American developed country. They investigated the examples of South Korea (contrast with North Korea) and Hong Kong and China’s special economic zones (that copy the HK model), Singapore, that became prosperous while their neighbors sank in the mire.

The politics is noisy in Honduras right now, and the dirty laundry is now public, but it was always thus. It’s just that after 2009, they have to stay clean, at least until the sons of the Chavez-Zelaya-Castro marriage grab a majority or plurality.

It was always much WORSE in fact. I have certain knowledge that many of the Congress years past were into the kinds of business that would make Al Capone blush. And that includes some of those now demanding “democracy” from the controlling coalition.

Fighting over the spoils of conquest is what this is, and people must push back against any government having any power at all to loot anybody.

Luke 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised…

Matthew 17:24 And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute?

25 He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?

26 Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free.

This is a fatal disconnect. Washington’s Blog and others seem to assume that if regulation is followed up by aggressive enforcement and incarceration, then honesty will increase and people will be better behaved. But so far as we can tell, it has never been proven to be the case that regulation and authoritarian enforcement cures wrongdoing. It is the history of empires to create a climate conducive to corruption. The corruption is then engaged by the very elements of empire that have nourished the corruption to begin with. Certainly there is wrongdoing aplenty. Here are just some of the recent improprieties by big banks, according to the article:

Laundering money for terrorists (the HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says that the giant bank is still laundering money, saying: “The public needs to know that money is still being funneled through HSBC to directly buy guns and bullets to kill our soldiers …. Banks financing … terrorists affects every single American.” He also said: “It is disgusting that our banks are STILL financing terror on 9/11 2013″.

Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs and other arms which are banned in most of the world

Handling money for rogue military operations

Laundering money for drug cartels. Indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis). A whistleblower said: “America is losing the drug war because our banks are [still] financing the cartels”, and “Banks financing drug cartels … affects every single American”.

Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments

Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide.

Manipulating aluminum and copper prices.

Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis.

Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold. And raiding allocated gold accounts.

Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them.

Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car.

Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure.

Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing .

Manipulating the hundred trillion dollar derivatives market.

Engaging in insider trading of the most important financial information.

Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves.

Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets.

Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices.

Manipulating corporate bonds through derivatives schemes.

Otherwise manipulating markets.

Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees.

Helping the richest to illegally hide assets.

Cooking their books.

Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments.

Violently cracking down on peaceful protesters.

And yet … at least some of what is mentioned above is questionable from a criminal standpoint. Things like market manipulation, wash trades, frontrunning and other “crimes” are a function of a marketplace that has gotten too large and in which too many titanic firms trade. They simply can get away with more, and it is impossible to police much of what is taking place.

The solution is to reintroduce competition and let customers themselves sort out the “bad guys.” Unfortunately, regulations and judicial fiat make this almost impossible. The competitive market cannot perform its curative function. In its place we have regulatory democracy and occasional prosecutions.

The real problem is not “criminality” but bigness and most importantly state-enforced bigness. Let us ask: Where does this bigness come from? In fact, it comes from the state enforced immunity of corporate personhood. Wall Street firms, like large corporations everywhere, provide virtual immunity from consequences for those who manage them.

When one works for the state these days, one can use the threat of terrorism to repel accusations of almost any criminal or violent act while in Leviathan’s employment.

Similarly, corporate personhood inoculates those at the top of corporations from the consequences of their actions. They are usually not sued. They are certainly not jailed. The corporation itself – with its overflowing coffers – is subject to the “punishment.” And everyone moves on. –

This is a demonstration of what I mean when I say left-fascist: it’s the marriage of people the Media likes to call “rightist” and the special interests they would call “leftist” if they were consistent. The parties play along. Dems pretend to rant and rave against Big Business and demand agencies to control them, and then invite Big Business to write the legislation (as long as they make some contributions to their PACs), and as long as Big Business agrees to let them buy the poor man’s vote with freebies.

The party-boss Repubs pretend to demand business-friendly policies and legislation, but then they invite Big Business (like the big contributors to the USCC budget) to help write the business-friendly legislation with both the regulations and rules that stunt smaller competitors, plus, write all kinds of payouts to the contributors.

The article says that it’s their reaction to the so-called “tea party” shutdown of government over Obamacare last year (2013).

Really? Or is it –just maybe– because the “Tea Party” identifying Congressmen are hanging out shingles on their doors that say “No Sale”?

Sure, a few really big corporations lost some government money during that shutdown. Mr. Unofficial Fabian Socialist of the left-fascist faction made sure of that, as anyone who paid attention to the details knows.

But then they kept on going.

Maybe it’s the tea-party’s major issue that has them scared: That fedgov has gotten way too big, and handles way too much money.

To me, it was a fascinating turn of events. I never thought the Chamber of Commerce, that claims to be the voice of business and –so we thought– free enterprise, would be so blatant and public about advocating against freedom of enterprise and relief for the “Taxed Enough Already”. But there they go, they are.

I thought they might grumble silently, because the businesses that have survived the Fed, the income tax, regulation, the New Deal, the War on Poverty, the wars in Europe, the welfare-warfare state, and the lead-up to the rollout of the Unaffordable Sick Act (aka Obamacare; or )

Of course it’s the small businesses that cannot afford the deep-pocket lobbyists who really are sick and tired of fedgov burdens and chains on their economic freedoms. The last thing they want to do is to kill their business by endangering their customers. But government-protected businesses have to be big, for the kind of results demanded and for the influence they get.

So, there you go. America’s biggest corporations have declared themselves full supporters of left-fascist government. I warned conservatives in the Bush years that the totalitarian surveillance state would be turned on them with a changing to the Hustler-in-Chief. I warned the “liberals” and the “Democrats” that there was no difference.

Sure, Obama would accelerate Bush’s push to expand the welfare state, but then he would also continue and expand the warfare state. This is a big-business unspoken understanding, but know this: the biggest among them would rather lose the medical industry to Obama’s”care” than to give up their now full-blown partnership with fedgov’s force-enforced domination of the economy.

Obama’s cabinet picks, and especially his “czars” (short for little Caesars) demonstrated this clearly. He had people from Wall Street, Big Bankers including Goldman Sachs, Big Industry, leftists from Academia, including open Communists, the environmentally religious, all thrown into the same mix and working together.

Really big business marries Big Brother, a trade made in hell. Big Business sells its wares to fedgov, and fedgov operatives sell favors to Big Business.

Yep. Congress has about a 9% approval rate and a general 90-95 percent re-election rate, where it jumped to after passage of the McCain Feingold Incumbent Protection-Racket Campaign Finance Reform. Before that act it was already hard enough to unseat one of this most despised political club in the country at an 80 percent re-election rate.

GALATIANS 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

8 For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

The Daily Bell writers regularly surprise me with perceptive insights, some of them of monumental importance in current events. They make connections that many of us fail to make, they often connect the dots for us.

Uruguay has become the first nation in modern times to “legalize” marijuana use. But the law requires users to register with the government, and restricts consumption per user to “up to 40g (1,4oz) of the drug a month”. It may be a step in the right direction, but that’s not much. When I was a college kid I toked (as we called it) on weekends, but quit later. My experience with it gave me a great way to tell my kids about it, how it makes you really, really dumb. Oh yes it does!

But despite the wasteful uselessness of the recreational use of the drug for a chemical high, banning it altogether is still worse, and the best scenario as in all things concerning such issues, is to ban the use of force to prevent its use for any reason whatsoever. Introducing a machinery of third parties making a maze of rules about it, means also creating an armed group with the purpose of making people obey those rules under threat.

Better to convince users with facts, rather than using the threat of force.

So now, the Democrats are the ones who are complaining about “free-loaders”? What a change of heart! So all you other guys, you can now stop calling them “bleeding-heart”! Call them stone-cold hearted!

First a few links that provide some reality perspective on the latest noise.

For example, Peggy Noonan points out that the attention is now starting to turn away from the obvious incompetence of government shown in the non-performance of the Obamacare web site, bad as it is, and is turning toward the actual Unaffordable Sick Care Act itself. (aka Obamacare). People are beginning to understand this reality, which I set apart for emphasis:

Obamacare is going to make a lot of people literally a lot more sick than they were.

Why? Because we are the subjects of this new kingdom where the monarch class (legislators, executives, and certain privileged parties) lives by its own privileged rules and gives us serfs a different set of rules.

Here’s another couple of truths most of us are aware of, and talk around it a lot, but here it is, telling it like it is:

Almost all congresspeople today do NOT believe in “equal treatment under the law”, because their actions speak louder than their words.

Most United States presidents in our lifetimes (I personally would say all of them) do NOT believe in “equal treatment under the law”, because their actions speak louder than their words.

Most United States Supreme Court judges (and most federal judges) in our lifetimes (I would say all of them) do NOT believe in “equal treatment under the law”, because their actions speak louder than their words.

Even the ones that loved Obama and rallied around the Obamacare flag, (well, almost none of us) really bothered to read the bill but just believed the promises, or the detractors, depending on which team in the perennial political popularity contest you preferred. (Never mind it did not even get the five days review time on a publicly available web site like Obama promised all legislation would get before it was passed or signed.)

But now it’s past the time to read the bill, and though some few hardy souls did read the bill early on, and even fewer hardy and brainier souls understood the bill, now the rubber hits the road and we see its damage up front and close.

Everybody is talking about it. Even the diehard reality-defying defenders of the bill admit the most acerbic and bitter criticisms.

They admit that the language of the promises was designed to deceive. The biggest and fastest lie was uncovered after getting past the attempt of a few mavericks and “young Turks” in Congress to signal their attempt to prevent the damage to the little guy from this “train wreck”.

The lie: “If you like it you can keep it”, the “it” being your insurance plan, your doctor, fill in the blanks. Never mind nobody who thought logically (who does?) should have believed it, because the other parts of the sales pitch made keeping that one impossible, like the detractors said.

In other words, without knowing it, right now, all kinds of media personalities that helped sell this, and are now shocked at the bills coming in from the Progressive Piper, well, in their own way, they are saying that the most “outrageous” voices against passage of Obamacare, were right.

Oh yeah.

GREAT LEADER (BIG BROTHER?) IS ALWAYS RIGHT?

Even the stalwart defenders are going down with the Fort like it was Alamo, convinced that their Great Leader is always right, just like in the Orwell novel, no matter what he says.

WHAT IS A LIE?

Oh, that’s okay, they say, that Obama lied so he could “Shanghai” us into his plans for central control dictates. And it’s better for you. (Later for that.) Even when they try to say it’s the insurance companies’ fault you had substandard plans or that you didn’t understand that her really meant the “grandfathered” plans you had before the passage of the bill.

Never mind he had to know that anybody listening in good faith (the listener not the propagandist) would take that to include the tweaks that come with all plans, or would take it as a stand-alone statement.

Sorry, the “mental reservation” excuse does not apply. Here’s a dictionary definition of a “lie”. The definition meets the reality:

Paper receipts for a vote are not enough. Make the ballot to be THE OFFICIAL ballot, and then the electronic count is just a count that is verifiable by going back to the hard copy.

Going back and re-reading an electronic store of a vote tally and calling that a “recount” is an outrageous scam. Whenever the elections officials talk about these changes, they say that they have increase the “confidence” of the voters in the elections “results”, which just means they have to fool enough people with the announced figures to get away with it.

But people are learning..

Check out the work done by Black Box Voting, and read founder Bev Harris‘ book “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century: Bev Harris”:

For example, it’s not a shutdown. The worst parts are still going full blast, including NSA spying and all the “dole” programs. (I don’t call them “entitlements”, a lying word, nobody is “entitled” to steal their neighbor’s anything under any decent law)

I liked what you wrote on this web page from a 1997 speech it looks like, about strategy.

Looks like the Liberty Caucus is doing this, and the Republican Liberty Caucus. A friend locally is working within the Republican Party structure. Another I met at the local Rothbardian Circle meeting is running for mayor of a small local municipality as an anarcho-capitalist on the Libertarian Party ticket I think.

However, you mention restricting voting to property owners and excluding “all public employees”. Good idea, and it would be a good teaching tool to talk about it, but that looks like a big hurdle to overcome. But it deserves to be talked about and repeated and repeated.

I’m thinking about it, but it takes commitment and time I don’t have much of, plus as a Bible-believing Christian, I’m looking toward working to educate Christians in general with Christ’s message of liberty. Gary North has done a work on the economics of the Bible along those lines, but this is a walk through the general ideas on it.

Christians have too much of a fatalistic interpretation of Romans 13 (obey the authorities), talk about paying taxes as doctrine as if Jesus never told us what he thought about taxing authorities in Matthew 18 (only their children are “free”). And as if the laws of Moses had anything to do with government. (I Samuel makes clear that people who want a government (“king”) to rule over them, they are rejecting God.

That’s it in a nutshell. I spread it everywhere. I wrote a book (actually “booklet”) but I need an editor to read it before pushing it aggressively. Maybe I’ll have that soon.